1. These assumptions are developed fully in a number of places, but particularly in Clebsch, William A., “A New Historiography of American Religion,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 32 (1963): 225–257;Google ScholarMay, Henry F., “The Recovery of American Religious History,” American Review 70 (10 1964) 79–92;Google ScholarBrauer, Jerald C., “Changing Perspectives on Religion in America,” in Reinterpretation in American Church History, ed. Brauer, Jerald C. (Chicago, 1968), pp. 1–28;Google ScholarBowden, Henry, Church History in the Age of the Science: Historiographical Patterns in the United States (Chapel Hill, 1971).Google Scholar

2. Baird, Robert, Religion in America (New York, 1856), pp. 66–70, 77–89, 96–121, 171–178, 240–267, 530–539;Google ScholarAhlstrom, Sydney, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, 1972).Google Scholar Ahlstrom provides his interpretation not only in the content of the chapters but also in the structure of the book, the titles of the sections and chapters, and especially in the quotations that introduce each of the sections. He leaves no doubt that the religious history of the American people is the history of Puritan influence which shaped and formed the American people, produced a particular hegemony in the face of diversity, and gradually gave way to a rising pluralism that triumphed in the mid-twentieth century. He argues that the Puritans “laid the chief foundations of American religious life in nearly every colony” (p. 843) that played “a vast sustaining and defining role in the life of the nation during the entire nineteenth century” (p. 470), and, in spite of what happened to the holy commonwealth in New England, “their moralism and strict views of private behavior, as well as their conviction that America was a model for the world, remained” (p. 843). The last section of his book is entitled “Toward Post-Puritan America.”

3. Mead, Sidney E., “By Puritanism Possessed,” World View 16 (04 1973): 49–51.Google Scholar

4. Mead, Sidney E., The Lively Experiment (New York, 1963);Google ScholarThe Nation With the Soul of a Church (New York, 1975);Google Scholar and The Old Religion in the Brave New World (New York, 1977).Google Scholar Of Mead's many writings, these three provide, in essence, his interpretative principles. It is only in recent years, beginning with Herberg's, WillProtestant-Catholic-Jew (New York, 1955),Google Scholar that attention was given to all three groups in sketching out religion in America. Since that time, almost all survey histories have brought in Judaism, Eastern Orthodoxy, black Christian churches, and other religious groups under the rubric of a growing radical pluralism in American life. However, all histories but one continued to work on the basic assumption of an overwhelming nationwide Protestant Puritan hegemony. Catherine Albanese attempted in an introductory text, America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, Calif., 1981),Google Scholar to construct a survey history that totally eschewed the old assumptions. Though it leaves much to be desired, as a first effort it is to be commended and carefully considered.

5. Harry S. Stout has provided a remarkable summary of the achievements and contributions of quantitative history, as well as a thoughtful critique and a series of ingenious proposals as to next steps for that approach, in “Culture, Structure, and the ‘New History’ History: A Critique and An Agenda” in Computers and the Humanities 9 (1975): 213–230.Google Scholar

6. It is unnecessary to list the large number of excellent books that have appeared on these subjects in the past decade—they have been the bread and butter of historical studies of religion in America. An excellent summary on recent Middle Colony scholarship was prepared by Greenberg, Douglas in “The Middle Colonies in Recent American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, 36 (1979): 396–427.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Regionalism is not employed in the technical sense as developed by the University of North Carolina school, exemplified by Howard Odum, Henry Moore, and others. Just as the United States developed in terms of regions from its colonial days—New England, Middle Colonies, Southern Colonies—through the frontier into the twentieth century, so did the religious history of the nation develop, in part, in relation to those regions. It is dubious that a single set of assumptions based on a particular hegemony is adequate to the reality of that history. This conclusion becomes abundantly clear when one analyzes the development of religion in the South and compares that with developments in other sections of the nation. See Odum, Howard W., The Regional Approach to Social Planning (Chapel Hill, 1935);Google ScholarSouthern Regions of the United States (Chapel Hill, 1936);Google ScholarOdum, Howard W. and Moore, H. E., eds., American Regionalism (Gloucester, Mass., 1966).Google Scholar

7. A partial selection from among their many works would include: Mathews, Donald G., Religion in the Old South (Chicago, 1977);Google ScholarIsaac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982);Google ScholarHill, Samuel S., Southern Churches in Crisis (New York, 1966);Google ScholarHolifield, E. Brooks, The Gentlemen Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860 (Durham, N.C., 1978);Google ScholarRaboteau, Albert J., Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

8. That vision is sketched out admirably in Handy, Robert T., A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Christian Realities, 2d ed. (New York, 1984);Google ScholarMarty, Martin E., Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York, 1970);Google Scholar and Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: the Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago, 1968).Google Scholar

9. An excellent analysis of that effort under a variety of rubrics but concentrating particularly on insider-outsider or mainstream concepts is presented by Moore, R. Laurance in an AHR Forum, “Insiders and Outsiders in American Historical Narrative and American History,” American Historical Review 87 (1982): 390–423.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Granted its problems and limitations, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier hypothesis remains the most provocative and influential single interpretative theme produced in American historiography. It was an ingenious application of a regional concept to the whole sweep of American history. See especially Billington, Ray Allen, Federick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

11. Baird, , Religion in America, pp. 263–367.Google Scholar

12. Woodward, C. Van, The Burden of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1960), p. x.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. vii.

14. Mathews, Religion in the Old South.

15. Ibid., pp. 247–250.

16. Ibid., pp. 137–150.

17. Unfortunately, no studies have been done on a comparative basis. It is left to the reader to note these differences, but they are easily discernable. See Bruce, Dickson D. Jr, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1974);Google ScholarBoles, John B., The Great Revival, 1789–1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (Lexington, 1972);Google ScholarMathews, Donald G., “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780–1830,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 23–43;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLoveland, Anne C., Southern Evangelicals and the Social Order, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1980), pp. 65–90.Google Scholar

18. See especially Rhys Isaac, Transformation of Virginia; Bolton, S. Charles, Southern Anglicanism: the Church of England in Colonial South Carolina (Westport, Conn., 1982);Google ScholarMills, Frederick V., Bishops by Ballot: An Eighteenth-Century Ecclesiastical Revolution (New York, 1978);Google ScholarDavis, Richard B., Intellectual Life in the Colonial South, 2 vols. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1978).Google Scholar

19. Bodo, John R., The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812–1848 (Princeton, 1954);Google ScholarFoster, Charles I., An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (Chapel Hill, 1960);Google ScholarSmith, Timothy R., Revivalism and Social Reform in Mid-Nineteenth America (Baltimore, 1980);Google ScholarCole, Charles C., The Social Ideas of the Northern Evangelists (New York, 1954).Google Scholar See also Handy, A Christian America; Marty, Righteous Empire.

20. Consult above works but especially Tuveson, Redeemer Nation. It is interesting to note that no major Southern clergy are quoted in Handy or Tuveson with regard to the formation of a Christian America or the redeemer nation concept. Marty quotes several only in the section on the fight between North and South to demonstrate that there were two chosen nations within one empire in order to hold the idea of a single righteous empire. In a sense, the South “did not lose its place in the empire”; Righteous Empire, p. 66. But was there ever a national righteous empire either in antebellum or post-Civil War America until the early twentieth century? The South had its own concept of manifest destiny, and it was not related to the republic. See also, Cherry, Conrad, God's New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971)Google Scholar and Merk, Frederick, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History: A Reinterpretation (New York, 1963).Google Scholar Especially important is Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens, Ga., 1980), p. 1.Google Scholar He begins his work with the striking statement, “This is a study of the afterlife of a Redeemer Nation that died.” He demonstrates that the South had a redeemer nation concept of its own and never participated in the Northern version. With the defeat of the vision, the entire reality was transformed into a new reality—the Lost Cause built on religion in the South and the historical experience of the war. Yet Wilson makes absolutely clear that “the religion of the Lost Cause originated in the antebellum period”; ibid. In short, religion in the South never was similar in role and content to that of the North, even in the antebellum period.

21. Mathews, , Religion in the Old South pp. 78–80.Google Scholar Most historians of the South place the distinctive Southern view of history—as tragic, ambiguous, aware of “frustration, failure, and defeat”—after the Civil War; Woodward, , Burden of Southern History, p. 19.Google Scholar Mathews grounds the Southern view in the evangelical experience which is then reinforced by the events of the Civil War. The point is that Southern experience, both religious and political, was drastically different from that of the rest of the United States, and it created a different view of religion and history that persisted until the twentieth century. It would be fascinating to trace out the history of the transformation of that Southern experience in the twentieth century, to understand how the South appears to have become the flagbearer of a new drive towards a righteous empire. Charles R. Wilson dates it with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and World War I; Baptized in Blood pp. 171–182.

22. Nowhere was this view more clearly articulated than in the efforts of the Northern evangelists to reform every evil in their society, from prison reform to the antislavery crusade. The fact is that contemporary power in their society was so constituted that they could and did achieve success in many of their endeavors. They were never without opposition—sometimes strenuous—but the total situation was so formed that they did not face total defeat or repression at the hands of entrenched social power. Experience confirmed their belief that nothing could stop the march of the kingdom of God. See especially Barnes, Gilbert, The Anti-Slavery Crusade (New York, 1933);Google Scholar Charles I. Foster, Errand of Mercy; Charles C. Cole, Social Ideas; and that grand old study by Tyler, Alice Felt, Freedom's Ferment (Minneapolis, 1944).Google Scholar

23. Except for the founding fathers influenced by the Enlightenment, Southern Protestants probably did not share in the vision of a religion of the republic. Most writers have assumed that the nation, the republic, was endowed with a religious dimension shared by the people and undergirded by the views of the founding fathers, the successive presidents, and the denominations. It is strange that nobody has investigated the consequences of antebellum southerners' quite different view of the federal government for the question of civil religion, religion of the republic, or public religion. If they located that religion within the state and not in the federal government, which appears likely, where then is antebellum civil religion? Was it confined to other regions of the United States? When and how did it emerge as a national reality? See Smith, E.A., ed., The Religion of the Republic (Philadelphia, 1971);Google ScholarWilson, John F., Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia, 1979).Google Scholar Charles Wilson argues that the “Lost Cause” became a Southern civil religion that prevailed in the rest of the nation; Baptized in Blood, pp. 12–14, 28–29, 33, 119, 161. A closer examination of the antebellum South would reveal that a separate civil religion was already at work in the South, and its birth did not coincide with the South's defeat.